Responding to Reproductive Asymmetry
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Responding to Reproductive Asymmetry
Our society demands women "catch up" to men's rootlessness
Because of Easter this week, I’ll be taking Thursday and Monday off. Other Feminisms will resume posts on April 8th with a roundup of your thoughts on whether we make an idol of marriage.
Last weekend, I tuned into FCLNY’s symposium on contemporary feminism (appropriately enough for the topic, I listened from the floor as my fourteen month old daughter piled toys on my head). The conference brought together Robin L. West, Eva Feder Kittay, Erika Bachiochi, and Elizabeth Schiltz for a discussion, full of firm and fruitful disagreement.
Erika, the author of the forthcoming The Rights of Women, began her talk with a powerful statement about how her feminism is a response to asymmetries between men and women. She’s given me permission to excerpt her remarks below. (The emphasis at the end is mine.)
Robin West has expressed really powerfully how constitutionalizing abortion rights has shifted our focus—both legally and culturally—away from addressing the social and sexual imbalances that result in unwanted pregnancies to managing the unwanted pregnancy itself. She writes: “Roe [v Wade] legitimates both unwanted sex and the hierarchies of power that generate it.” I fundamentally agree with this critique but want to take it a step further. I want to suggest that the putative right to abortion not only legitimates but exacerbates the reproductive and social imbalances or asymmetries between men and women—and I think this is especially true for women who are poor.
[T]he most basic and consequential asymmetry between men and women is that when they engage in sexual intercourse, it is women, and not men, who may end up pregnant. A man can just walk away from an unintentional pregnancy and blithely return to the course of his life, but a now-pregnant woman, should she wish to be equally free of the deeply unequal consequence of their union, will need to engage in a life-destroying act. […]
Clearly justice calls for a societal response to reproductive asymmetry. Indeed, I think recognizing this is perhaps what makes one a feminist.
The divide among modern feminisms is about what the societal response to reproductive asymmetry should be.
Is the goal to help women “catch up” to men’s freedom to walk away? That’s the logic of abortion, artificial wombs, the promotion of casual sex.
Or is the goal to make room for women as they are, and even to help men “catch up” to the kind of responsibility that women shoulder unchosen?
I’m in the latter camp, thinking men and women are both ill-served by a culture that expects us to be rootless widgets, able to walk away from anything that complicates our availability to an employer.
Women find our culture an impossible fit, but just because men can contort themselves to fit into an inhumane economy doesn’t mean they’re well-served by those demands.
Responding to Reproductive Asymmetry
One support I see as essential to responding to reproductive asymmetry (a term that's new to me and that I really like!) is paid parental leave. I tell anyone who will listen that 1) FMLA leave is available to BOTH PARENTS, not just the mother and 2) my husband is the only man I've ever met who took all 12 weeks of his FMLA leave and that was essential to our ability to navigate having premature twins. I work in a male-dominated industry and I think the most leave I've ever seen a man take following the birth of a healthy baby was two weeks and this is uncommon, most men are back after a week, with maybe a reduced schedule for a few weeks after that. FMLA leave is unpaid which means you can only stay out of the workforce as long as your savings account and vacation time can support you; most people do not have 3 months of living expenses as cash on hand, and even fewer people have vacation time which accrues to the point of being able to take 3 months off and not miss a paycheck (full disclosure that this was our situation; my husband's employer allows sick leave to roll over year-to-year and he's a generally healthy person who had been there for 14 years when our twins were born. 3 years later when we had our 3rd his sick leave balance was much smaller but he still had enough to stay home for 6 weeks). If we had paid parental leave and suddenly it became normal to see fathers leave the workplace for 2-3 months around the birth of a child, then it would not be seen as a "problem" that is only associated with female employees!
You've set up what is potentially a false dichotomy, here. A person could want freedom to walk away at some times, and support in bearing womanly (or indeed manly) responsibilities at other times. I completely agree that the latter needs to be supported, but I suspect that dismantling the former is unlikely to be helpful, in that regard. Most of the time, when women don't have the freedom to do something for reasons involving biology, men are all too happy to say "Whoops, how did that happen? Oh, well, not our fault, guess you'll have to put up with it" and completely ignore the role of society in making childbearing and child-rearing so difficult.
This is a complex issue. Ample parental leave for both parents is certainly one part of the solution, as is an expectation (and understanding) that fathers will also take time off when a new baby arrives. My husband had nine weeks of paid leave available from his employer, and it was flexible in when it could be used, so we used other types of leave for a couple of weeks when the baby was born, and then invoked his parental leave when our baby was about eight months old, in order to help with my transition back to work. That was really helpful.
In addition, I would like to see a society in which we don't feel we have to hide the realities of childbearing. There's real pressure to say that, no, being pregnant doesn't affect your ability to work at all (even though morning sickness hits hard, for some people, and you can get pretty exhausted, towards the end, too). We also need to acknowledge that being a birthing parent is a different experience to being a non-birthing parent -- the lesson of how "stopping the tenure clock" around the birth of a child mostly just leads to a huge boost in the careers of fathers is an important one, here. Fathers can and should be taking time to help with a new baby, but there's no way to make the experience of giving birth "equal" to the experience of having your partner give birth.
I find myself disturbed by the ways in which society is willing to take advantage of the manifold vulnerabilities associated with pregnancy and childbirth. There are the ways in which the medical system holds the health of mothers and babies hostage to an overly-restrictive regime in which doctors are assumed to have authority over details as small as whether a birthing mother can stand or lie down. We need better mental health support for new mothers who may be experiencing post-natal depression. We need to recognise the ways in which a pregnant woman (or a new mother) is particularly vulnerable to abuse; we need to not be ashamed of the ways in which the psychology of childbearing plays into this, telling us that if someone (perhaps literally) poops on us then we should take care of that person rather than protesting.
We need to support the compatibility of care and of ambition -- two powerful sources of meaning that neither men nor women deserve to be cut off from. If women lose out on career opportunities because they want to take care of their preschool children (in a full time or even just part time capacity), the assumption is that this is their "choice" and that nothing has gone wrong, here, even if taking that time means they lose out on important life dreams, or find themselves relegated to less prestigious, more "feminine" job positions, because those are the types of jobs that will consider accommodating them.
This also influences when women choose to bear children. There's this fear that if we have children too early (by which I mean, in our twenties), we won't be "established" in our careers, and will find ourselves forever cut off from certain opportunities. We take it as given that entering the workforce as a mother will be hard, that we will need previous experience we can point to in order to prove to employers that we are worth hiring, and that if we don't have that experience then it's a foregone conclusion that we will miss out.
Childbearing takes a lot of time and energy, there's no doubt about that. But the tradeoffs aren't fixed. When society is willing to come together around new parents and help them out, that makes a huge difference. When that societal support is paired with a respect for mothers as full human beings, rather than a view of mothers as saintly madonnas who can and should martyr themselves unnecessarily ... well, I don't even know what that would look like. I want to find out.